Randy Bazemore

This powerful oversize press photograph documents Judith McLaughlin, age 47, walking along Ocean Drive in Miami Beach with all of her possessions gathered onto a small cart. Across from the pastel people sipping pastel wine at the pastel Carlyle hotel, Judith McLaughlin wears her $140 blue pin-striped suit, a dirty lace scarf and soiled gray leather gloves to collect used soft drink cans littered along Ocean Drive. She piles the cans into white plastic bags, tied to a shopping cart full of blankets and clothes, a poster oven and a utility knife. A black and white television set, on which she used to watch The Tonight Show, anchors the heap. “This is like The Twilight Zone, living here. There’s so much peace and beauty. And look at the pastel colors,” she says. “I wear this suite in case I get an office job and have to get cleaned up.” She searches the streets for aluminum cans, recyclable scraps exchanged for spare change, a fragile economy of survival in late-20th-century urban America.

Photographed by Randy Bazemore, staff photographer for the Miami Herald, the image belongs to a broader body of social documentary work produced during the 1980s, when homelessness became increasingly visible in American cities. Rising housing costs, reductions in social services, and limited access to mental-health care forced many individuals into public spaces—sidewalks, alleys, and beaches—where daily life unfolded in full view.

McLaughlin’s posture is forward-leaning, intent. She is not posed, not dramatized. The camera records motion rather than spectacle: the slow, deliberate movement of a woman navigating traffic, heat, and exhaustion with quiet determination. The cart functions as home, storage, and livelihood combined.

Today, the photograph stands as a sober document of the 1980s homelessness crisis—

a reminder that for many, survival meant carrying everything they owned through streets built for those who could leave things behind.